Tom Peters's True Confessions

The conventional wisdom was what Peter Drucker had sold to General Motors, what Robert McNamara had installed at the Pentagon, and what David Kearns was stuck with at Xerox. It all went back to Frederick Winslow Taylor and scientific management. The theory that Taylor devised came to be known as "the one best way." In essence, Taylorism said that every job could be reduced to a simple, repeatable, mechanical set of activities that even the stupidest, most unwilling worker could do. In his 1911 book, The Principles of Scientific Management, Taylor had written about Schmidt, whose job was to shovel coal. By breaking Schmidt's job down into scientifically detailed steps, Taylor showed how he could increase productivity, reduce mistakes, and make even the dumbest ox of a man a dependable employee. Hardly an uplifting view of work or your employees.

Start with Taylorism, add a layer of Druckerism and a dose of McNamaraism, and by the late 1970s, you had the great American corporation that was being run by bean counters -- or at least by the bean-counter mentality. Everything was reduced to numbers and finance. The CEO of General Motors announced that GM wasn't in the business of making cars, it was in the business of making money. (This came as a shock to most of GM's customers, who were in the market to buy a car -- or even better, a way of life -- not to spend money.) That may account for the rise of Japanese automakers, who most certainly were in the business of making cars -- and, in particular, cars that customers would definitely want to buy, since they were low in cost and high in quality, and they got plenty of miles to the gallon of gas in the age of OPEC-inspired oil embargoes.

Back to Xerox. Xerox hired MBAs with IQs of 180 or higher, and they spent all of their time and energy arguing about "cross-elasticities of demand." Meanwhile, they were content to make crappy copiers (albeit the first copiers). But they didn't care about the product or the people or the customers. It was all about the numbers. The numbers, the numbers, the numbers. I was fed up with the numbers.

Search said, It's not all about the numbers. Profits are cool. They give you room to invest in cool stuff. But somebody has to bleed. Somebody has to show some passion. Search, I like to think, put the blood back into business.

Here's an example. One of our interviews early on was with John Young, who was then president of Hewlett-Packard. Today, HP is a $50 billion company in the computer business. Back in 1976, it had just passed the $1 billion mark, and it was mostly making medical devices and measurement equipment. In 1977, $1 billion made HP a serious company.

Remember, I'd done consulting at Xerox, Chase Manhattan Bank, and lots of other big McKinsey clients with lots of big bureaucracy. Bob and I went to HP headquarters, which was then an astonishingly unimposing building on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto. When we arrived at the office, we asked to see John Young. Fine, said the person at the front desk. He's in there. Turn right. No cards to sign, no IDs to wear. Just go in there. We went in, and there was John, sitting in a cubicle that he shared with his secretary. It was all of 10 feet by 10 feet. He was in his shirtsleeves -- which may sound like no big deal in the post-dotcom, T-shirt world of 2001, but in 1977 was a stunning comment on how the place felt and worked. He was preaching MBWA: management by wandering around. It was anthropology, not statistical analysis! I remember thinking, This doesn't look right. It certainly doesn't look normal. After visiting John Young, I went to see Tait Elder at 3M and Rene McPherson at Dana Corp. These were business leaders who were operating from a fundamentally different playbook.

You could boil all of Search down to three words: People. Customers. Action. That was about as far as you could get from the prevailing wisdom of the time, which you could also boil down to three words: Numbers. Bureaucracy. Control. And you could boil all of Search down to one idea: Soft is hard. Up until then, everybody assumed that hard was hard. "Hard" numbers told you everything that you needed to know about dealing with hard assets, such as factories, machinery, and buildings. But Search said that everything soft is hard. People, customers, and relationships -- they make up all of the soft stuff that determines what really gets accomplished and how well it gets done. It turned out to be a revolutionary message.

How did we get away with it? We got away with it because Bob Waterman and I wore dark McKinsey suits with skinny McKinsey ties and spoke proper McKinsey consulting business-speak. Search is a McKinsey-looking book. It has a black cover with a conservative white typeface. Our message was revolutionary, but our credentials and our look were traditional.